


Of Ancient and Imperial Lineage

by lurknomoar



Category: Farmer Giles of Ham - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Rain and introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 08:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Chrysophylax muses about the glorious past of dragonkind and the miserable present of one specific dragon who happens to be himself.





	Of Ancient and Imperial Lineage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!  
> First of all, thank you for your lovely prompt! Secondly, you mentioned that you wouldn't mind references to other Tolkien works, so while this isn't quite a crossover, there are a (large) number of shout-outs to well, almost everything, including the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, and the LOTR proper.
> 
> (Warning for brief mentions of harm to animals and humans - this is a story about dragons, after all.)

Chrysophylax Dives felt miserable. He was stuck in a makeshift camp with the farmer and his newly recruited lads. This night, like every night for the past few days’ journey, his front legs were tied to two stakes in front of him, his back legs to two stakes behind him, and his wings were tied down, crushed under the weight of wooden chests and burlap sacks filled with his own treasure. It was not the least bit dignified. He wanted to curl up like a cat and work up a good sulk, the sort he could stew in for a week, then work it off by roaring down the mountains in a scorching firestorm of rage, burning a village or two, and having a good square meal of a few dozen sheep, maybe with a little shepherdess for dessert. But he couldn’t fly with this weight on him, he couldn’t even move much. He wrapped his tail around himself and shivered.

Dragons don’t really shiver, and hot dragons never do, as a rule. It was much colder up in the mountains, and Chrysophylax had often awoken to find a thick rind of frost on his scales before flaking it off with a single flex of his powerful muscles, or vaporizing it with a single puff of his powerful breath. And as they slowly descended from the mountains into the Wild Hills and from the hills through the dubious marches into the Middle Kingdom’s green, low-lying hills, the weather definitely became milder. It’s just that it was raining. And even the rain wasn’t all that cold, it’s just that the steady, disheartening plink, plink, plink of it seemed to cool his hide drop by drop, to quench his fire slowly but inexorably.

Three of the lads were standing guard over him – or two were, and the third was asleep on his feet. The first time they had to keep watch, they all looked terrified, fit to soil their breeches. The second night, they were emboldened by success, puffing their chests out all proud and self-important. From the third night on, though, they only looked tired and bored. Sometimes they sang to keep awake, and they sang heroic songs about Bellomarius, of all people! It was galling. He could have fried all three of them to crisp with a single blast. He could swat them like flies with one swipe of his tail – and they didn’t even bother to bind his tail! But even if they had remembered to bind it, what did that matter? The ropes on his legs were good ropes tied into really quite conscientious knots, but they were mere hemp, and how could hempen ropes hold a creature that could not be held by cold-forged steel? Yes, that was the worst part. Even tired and cramped and cold, he could have made easy work of ropes, and of the three bumpkins set to guard him. The only real danger was that they would wake the farmer, the farmer who slept snoring in a makeshift tent, still wearing his ridiculous armour of jingling-jangling scrap metal, one hand resting underneath his head and the other clutching the hilt of the sword, that thrice-damned sword that still would not sheathe itself. One loud noise, and the man would be up, and it wouldn’t matter if he was sleep-addled, he was bold and quick as long as he was holding Caudimordax, and Caudimordax could bite deep into the toughest dragonhide. No, if he did not want that, he had to pretend to be bound, and in pretending, he was bound for real.

He couldn’t attack, and he couldn’t go to sleep either. He recalled how luxurious, how restful it was to stretch out atop his hoard, his belly sinking into mounds of gold, his head resting on a scattering of jewels. Now that his fortunes were reversed, seeing that his treasures were on top of him instead of him being on top of them, he felt much less comfortable. He felt like a hopelessly overburdened pack mule, drowsing on his feet and startling to full wakefulness whenever the weight on his shoulders shifted. But if he had a chance to put his burdens down just for a minute, to stretch his hunched spine, his poor cramped wings, he would not have taken it. He would not for a moment have parted with his lovely gold. Well, he promised to part with it, certainly he did. And he was going to keep his promise unless he could come up with a way to break it.

He had to think of something. Why should he give his precious treasures away? Certainly, some of his hoard he had stolen from the lords and ladies of the Middle Kingdom, and maybe that gold could be said to belong to whatever kinglet claimed to be their heir. In earlier days, especially during that lovely century after the valleys filled with folk again, but before they remembered the trick of making good sharp steel, that lovely century when knights still fought with blunt iron, he went down from time to time, he had plundered more than one castle, he had waylaid more than one caravan. Oh, the times before Bellomarious, how restful they were, how lovely! But while there was always good eating on the plump nobility, their treasures were, frankly, pitiful. He rejoiced when he found some crude gold scrolling, maybe a real emerald or two: most of it was just colourful cut glass, set into copper plated with the thinnest layer of gold. Even the coins they dared to call gold were made of some dull muddled alloy, diluted more and more each year as the royal mint tried to stay afloat. No, the trinkets of men were less then a tenth part of his majestic hoard. The real gems of his hoard were not the gems that petty little kings of petty little low-land kingdoms wore on their crowns, nor the shiny little shards the men of this diminished age called diamonds. The blood-red rubies and water-pale sapphires in his hoard had been mined from the bowels of the earth by dwarven clans, the fairest of them were chiseled and polished to a sharp sheen by the people of Erebor in the time of their second exile. And some of his jewels were even older, they were true adamant crafted by the long-gone masters of the elven race, shining like stars dropped into a bottomless well. Even the metalwork was better in the bygone ages: he treasured some molten slags of gold, taken from abandoned hoards of other dragons, with the delicious miasma of dark magic still lingering about them, and he adored the delicately crafted work of millennia, memories of a time before the face of the earth changed, relics from the time before that time, the mithril of Moria and the gold of Gondolin.

Dragons crave riches, and they tend to take gold for its shine, not for its history, but Chrysophylax loved the taste of age, and even more than that, he loved to own something peerless, something that would never again exist, he loved thinking about how everyone who knew how to create such a thing has long since perished. He loved the latter so much that he made sure to eat every single one of the dwarves that built the mine-palaces that were to become his lair: they were the last ones alive who knew how to forge and string and tune the sweet-voiced triangular harps their forefathers had invented. Of course, being a dragon, he couldn’t exactly play the dozens of invaluable harps he now owned, but when he threw them at the wall, they made the loveliest jangling sound.

At the thought of his cosy labyrinthine lair, smelling slightly of charred knight and molten gold, he was all but overcome with despair, and huffed out a hot wet puff of steam. His makeshift guard startled, leaving the one dozing on his comrade’s shoulder to fall on his face in the mud. Chrysophylax could easily have speared him on the claws of his left front paw, without even sparing the effort to break his bonds, but he knew it wouldn’t be worth it, it wouldn’t even be funny. He just watched the lad scuttle away from him crab-like, and he blinked a slow blink of his coal-red eyes. The boy stood up when he was safely out of range, and tried to look menacing despite being liberally spattered with mud. Well, that was a little bit funny. He tried to take heart.

He was a dragon of ancient and imperial lineage, and just because he was hobbled like a horse, loaded up like a mule and wet as a drowned rat didn’t mean he had to give up on all of his pride. Sure, he could pretend to have no dignity, he could caper and grovel and go along with whatever the bearded idiot with the terrible sword said, but in the flickering furnace of his armored chest, he had to remember who he was. He took pride in the knowledge that while most pieces in his hoard were older than he was, his lineage was older than any of the timeless treasures he guarded, maybe except for the scorched remains of a gracefully carved alabaster oar he had found in a long-abandoned underground encampment. He was a great dragon from a line of great dragons, even if he didn’t feel like one at the moment. He had to remember what his mother had told him about the dragons that came before him. His mother had taught him many things about the olden days. She was his favourite child, and no wonder: he had eaten all the others while she was away hunting, and the last sibling he couldn’t eat, he pushed from the nest to plummet to his death. None of them could fly then, their wings were still filmy and weak. From that day on, his mother loved him best and called him her little egg. She brought him food, calves and goats and brewers and bakers, good rich meat for a growing drake, but she wouldn’t let him eat until he recited last night’s lesson, repeating the names and deeds and lairs that made up their lineage, that spelled out the history of dragonkind. If he lunged for his dinner, she would just bat him away with one large paw, and repeat the question. Well, that was hundreds of years ago, and in his own time, he ate her too, like she had eaten her own mother. He wished he could remember more of his ancestry, other than the fact that it had been long and illustrious. Had the dragons of old gotten into similar scrapes? And if they had, how did they get out?

One of his distant ancestors was Smaug, he remembered, the King beneath the Mountain, proud and cruel and vicious, ruling over the greatest hoard of its Age, holding sway over the land from the rich sweet town on the lake to the barren Northern fields of gorse. Smaug, courtly and clever and full of the deadliest riddles ever recorded. But then, Smaug was disposed of like the pest he was, shot down like a common starling, just because he had a gap in his armour and wasn’t clever enough to hide it. Well, Chrysophylax couldn’t make the same mistake. His armour was equally strong all over, protecting his belly just as well as it protected his back, thick natural dragonhide, his scales reinforced with thin plates of iron and a thick crust of of carborundum. When he first molded his armour to his flesh, it hurt worse than he expected. As a creature of flame himself, he didn’t know he could burn so. But the final result was quite admirable. He had nothing to fear from crossbows, and at arrows, he merely laughed. His hide was strong enough to break spears and to blunt most swords: even his eyes were protected if he just remembered to lower his lids a little. But of course Caudimordax wasn’t just about any sword, it was a magic sword, maybe even a sword forged from the metal of some long-forgotten elvish weapon, judging by its cruel cold sheen, and the way it cut through his armour as if it were no thicker than silk. He hadn’t made Smaug’s mistake, and yet his thick armour wasn’t enough protection.

Who else, who else could he recall? There was Ancalagon the Black, his spine vast as the jagged mountains of the north, his breath hotter than the bowels of the earth, and every beat of his massive wings a new thunderstorm. But of course Ancalagon fell too, when men came after him and elves and vile, clawing eagles, and if his fall crushed the tall towers of little people, ending an age of their world, what did that avail him? He was dead nonetheless. There were no eagles these days, though, or at least no eagles big enough to pose a threat. They still had sharp beaks and sharper claws, but a single puff fried them to a crisp. Most of the time, they didn’t even have the wits to evade a jet of fire aimed at them, because despite all their reputation for pride and nobility, none of them had more brains that a particularly slow chicken. But even if he had a clear sky above him, free of large birds and flying ships and other unsavoury forms of magic, he would still get nowhere with a plan that involved flying: after all, his wings were still weighed down.

He recalled all the dragons that had stuck in his mind from his mother’s interminable lessons, and tried to remember what each of them did in turn did to escape their fate, and how each of them failed. He remembered Scatha, the last of the great Long-worms, and his magnificent hoard of green-and-gold, rivalled only by Smaug's treasure. But unlike Scatha, he was no great burrower, he couldn’t twist and writhe and swim through earth and hide underneath it, curled up, biding his time. Chrysophylax had dug tunnels into sheer basalt walls when he wanted to, of course, but that took time, and it made a lot of noise too. He could kick out with his hind legs, maybe dig a little ditch into the half-frozen soil, but the guards would notice and raise a cry before the burrow he made was big enough to even curl up in.

He thought through all the hot and cold dragons, all the firedrakes and longworms that ever lived on this earth, or the earth before this earth was created from the wreck of a bygone world, the ones he could claim descent from and the ones with whom he held no kinship, but no answer was forthcoming. No names, no deeds, no foul victories or ignominious defeats changed the sad circumstance that he was bound hand and foot with his wings weighed down, and a man slept with a burning sword in his hand just ten paces from him. The past could give him no counsel, for the past was never so helpless, never so humiliated. Some of the elder dragons were defeated, some of them were slaughtered, certainly, but none of them were chased through the fields by a vicious grey mare or chased through the village by a drooling mongrel of a dog, none of them were looking forward to another day at the mercy of a lowly, red-bearded farmer.

A soggy, grey day was dawning when the well of his recollections ran dry, and he was left with nobody but the father and mother of all dragons, the very first worm to ever crawl forth from the belly of the earth, spitting forth flame, hungering for gold and for the flesh of the free peoples, the great dragon, Glaurung himself. Glaurung was mighty, Glaurung was powerful, Glaurung was suffused in spiteful witchery down to his smallest scale, for he was not born from frail eggs like the rest of dragonkind, but shaped by the will of the Maker himself, forged in the fires of wrath with the firm strength of his obsidian gauntlets and scalded alive by the three cruel lights of his crown. Maybe, if Chrysophylax was lucky, a spark of the oldest worm’s cunning was still burning somewhere in his guts, and he too could enchant men to walk to their fate proud and blind, he could show them the vileness of their own deeds in the glare of sudden sunlight so that by doom and despair overmastered, they plunged to their own deaths, their stories done and their bloodlines broken.

By the time the farmer staggered out of his tent, stretched his back with a loud yawn, uncorked his hip flask, had a swig of something strong that smelled of armour polish, and began to bellow orders at his new retinue, Chrysophylax had the beginnings of a plan.

“Good Master Aegidius,” he purred when the farmer stepped up to him to check the knots fastening his burden to his back. “Do you happen to have a sister?”

“No,” he said, yanking at a rope until he was satisfied that it would hold. “I have two brothers, but they both went to work at the ports out East. Come back every summer, pick a fight then leave again, and good riddance to the both of them.”

“Does you wife,” forged on Chrysophylax. “Does she have a sister then?”

“None. Only child.”

This intrigue thing was harder than it looked.

“Uh… does your dog have a sister?”

“Not anymore. We kept one pup, and drowned the rest of the litter in a sack. Didn’t need six full-grown dogs yapping about, eating us out of our house and home.”

Damnation, that plan was going nowhere. Then, while he saddled up his mare, the farmer’s big slow face assumed a big slow suspicious expression.

“Why are you asking?”

Chrysophylax was stumped for a moment, but then his cowardice supplied the answer.

“I just remembered," he wheedled." I had this pair of earrings, pearls the size of walnuts set in the softest, purest gold. They would be a grand gift for someone’s sister, is what I was thinking.”

“Stop trying to butter me up,” grumbled the farmer, now more annoyed than suspicious. “I already agreed not to cut you unless you make sudden moves, but I’m not giving you any allowances either. What do you want?"

“How about a bucket of water?” asked Chrysophylax, trying to keep his voice low and conciliatory. “I walked all day yesterday, without a drop to drink, and I’m going to walk all day today, too. Can I have a good long drink before we set out, so that I don’t collapse on the road? I wouldn't want to make you drag drag both my treasure and my sorry carcass back to Ham all by yourself.”

The farmer groaned and grumbled and sent one of his lads to the stream to fetch water, what’s more, he splashed something from his little flask into the bucket before Chrysophylax started drinking.

“To put some fire in your belly,” he said, and the dragon drank, tasting the thin traces of awful whiskey, and not pointing out that he had plenty of fire in his belly, and it wasn’t, at the moment, doing him any good.

As he downed the last of the mildly alcoholic swill and ponderously rolled his shoulders, preparing himself for another miserable day trudging through the mud of the Middle Kingdom, bound, with a sword brandished in his direction every now and then, it occurred to him that he had one advantage over all the glorious and all-powerful dragons of old: namely, that he was still alive. He lived through the cooling of the world, he saw the lowlands overrun with knights and the highlands starved of game, and unlike scores of dragons just like him, he had survived. He still had his own life, and it didn’t much matter what he else he lost as long as his heart kept beating in his chest and his lifeblood remained for the most part within his body. All else could be lost and regained, if he survived long enough to regain it. He was a dragon after all, and while he wasn’t young, he came from a long-lived kindred, whose lifespans were measured in centuries if not millennia. It wouldn’t hurt him much to spend a decade or so groveling to an uppity farmer, to follow, to obey, and to become, at least outwardly, a tame worm. He would leave when he could leave, return to his lair and to the remnants of his treasure, recover his strength, regain his dignity, and when that was done, he could reassemble his old hoard, piece by piece. Men’s lives were brief, and even men’s realms ended soon enough, battered by plague and fire, invasion and infighting, they slid into obscurity if one just had the patience to outlast them. And when that happened, when the land was once more bare but for a handful of meek paupers trying to eke out a living in the ruins of what was once a kingdom, he would return, and take what was his, take it from traders and treasurers, from the halls and hoards of those who stole them, dig them up from the depths of the earth and dredge them up from riverbeds. He would take it back, to the last coin. All he needed was time. And there was no shame in biding his time, for that was also the lot of the Maker of All Dragons in his cold exile outside the circles of the world: to wait, with relentless patience, for the day of reckoning.

 

 

EPILOGUE:

In the end, Chrysophylax believed that he did succeed in thwarting the bloodline of Farmer Giles, although the bloodline in question did not consider itself particularly thwarted. It all began when Augustus Bonifacius, Rex et Basileus but no king nor sovereign to the Little Kingdom, made an alliance with the mountain giants in an attempt to strike back at Old Giles Worming. It was the cunning advice of Chrysophylax that led Giles’ only son Georgie to set out North to try and scare the giants away, taking nothing but his father’s blunderbuss, some provisions on a pack horse, and a page named Suet. Chrysophylax either expected them to be clobbered to death, which he would have found somewhat amusing, or to succeed admirably and buy another few years of peace for the Kingdom, which might have convinced Giles that his kingdom was secure and he no longer needed a dragon around. He didn’t expect Georgie to end up in a hand-to-hand fight with a giant scout, lose an arm, be gallantly rescued by his heroic page, and he absolutely did not expect the two of them to fall into a grand and legendary sort of love. Well, he didn’t expect it, but in the way of dragons, he still took credit for it. Giles was overjoyed to see the Northern border protected, and to see his son and his son's beloved become the matter of heroic songs in their own right, but he was far less overjoyed that his son squarely refused to beget any sort of heir. Georgie set up court with Suet in the stone tower of the Farthingo Outpost, and nothing Giles said could persuade him to return home and claim the Little Kingdom's throne.

So, following Chrysophylax’s advice, and fully convinced that it was his own idea, Giles promised to give Caudimordax and the Little Kingdom to the bravest knight of his company, the strongest of the Wormwardens, and held a tournament after his own terrifyingly efficient rustic fashion. There was little bowing and capering, and far more broken noses and dislocated elbows. The winner, once she removed her helmet, turned out to be a distant relative of Giles, a grand-niece thrice removed or whatnot, the miller’s daughter in law. Here name was Marion, but everyone just called her Miller’s Molly. Miller's Molly could lift two fifty-pound sacks of flour, put them on her broad shoulders and walk them to the next village without breaking a sweat. When Miller's Molly was beset by an armed robber on the way home from the market, she gave him no coin and a bloody nose. She had birthed and raised three children, and she grew sturdy and stubborn in the work of it, before she ever decided to give knighthood a try. She was a sensible woman, she had beaten everyone in her way, and Giles had nothing to say against her, not if he didn’t want go back on his word. So was crowned the second sovereign of the Little Kingdom, the Queen Molly, and she ruled with justice and a strong hand, the buttery shine of pearls bright against her coarse hair, the weight of Tailbiter lifted proud in her hands.


End file.
